On Improving Myself

We all need to improve, right?

Someone said to me recently, "I'm done with all this self-help bullshit. It makes it all too complicated. If you want to improve, just improve." I have to say, I agree with such sentiment. The amount of self help books I've read, videos I've watched, "gurus" I've listened to can seriously boggle the mind. They all have a program with steps that you can take.

Be more effective!

Kick your bad habits!

Change your state!

And listen, I get it. There are habits I want to kick. Ways that I want to be a better person and a better mom. But the thing is, if I'm truly being honest with myself, I already know what I have to change. So, as mentioned above, can't I just ... improve?

knights-and-dragons.wikia.com

Why should I have to listen to some dude I don't know in order to gather my own strength?  Help is always good, but I can't help but feel like using a self improvement expert and leaning on this person goes against the whole point. How can you learn to improve yourself if you can't be strong enough to do it on your own?

Let's take a look at some really famous self help books:

          

We all want to have spiritual growth, be effective, stop worrying. But aren't we all capable of identifying our own worry? I agree that certain approaches can be helpful, but I think there's an overload of these sorts of texts. They stare at us from the bestseller list, daring us to fix our lives on our own.  In the end, though, people figured out life long before all of this. So tell me, what is it that you want to fix? Do you think you can do it on your own?